Fifty years after the Japanese bombs rained down on Hawaii, it would appear as if Pearl Harbor has claimed a belated victim. Clearing his desk at Walt Disney studios this week is chairman Peter Schneider, the man fingered as the fall guy for the movie's conspicuous box-office failure. According to Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Schneider has "chosen to go back to his roots in live theatre." In Hollywood terms, this is the equivalent of an exile to Siberia. Forty years spent touring Death of a Salesman around Nebraska, collecting ticket stubs in Virginia and clacking coconut shells from the wings in old Vermont. It might as well be a death sentence.

Make no mistake. Schneider deserves his sacking (or termination, or return to live theatre: whatever you want to call it). Anyone who has sat through the mind-bogglingly inept Pearl Harbor would be forgiven for demanding the man's head on a stick. Schneider made a terrible movie, and should therefore lose his job. And yet this - surprise, surprise - is not why he is leaving. What Schneider did was far worse. He made a terrible movie that doesn't look as if it is going to make a lot of money. Pearl Harbor could be twice as bad and twice as successful and he would be the toast of Beverly Hills. See James Cameron and George Lucas for details.

This, then, is the logic of Hollywood. It is a place where the bottom line is the profit you can make for the studios, the merchandisers and the stars (and both Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale have gambled on hefty percentage deals for Pearl Harbor) and where critical plaudits (good reviews, Oscars etc) are only valued in terms of the extra zeroes they can add onto a film's receipts.

Fair enough - this is capitalism in action, after all. And yet, when you break the figures down, the logic starts to look rather screwy. Most estimates peg Pearl Harbor's total budget at a whopping £179m. After nearly a month on release in the US, it has so far recouped £118m of that. When you add on its subsequent international returns, and film and video rights, the film will probably max out at around the £220m-250m mark. That's over £40m clear profit. In my book that makes Pearl Harbor a hit. In Hollywood - where expectation is all, and where Disney was banking on Titanic-style returns - it qualifies as a flop.

So spare a thought for Schneider, the victim of an industry where a hit isn't a hit unless it makes eleventy-squillion dollars. One crumb of comfort is that, confined to the small-scale world of live theatre, he'll never encounter this problem again. I have a fond image of the manager of the Omaha District Playhouse studying the receipts for an am-dram production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and raging that: ""By God, that incompetent Schneider has only made us £40m. He'll never work in this town again." Somehow I can't see it happening.